Uber at $135B: When the World’s Largest Taxi App Pretends to Be a Tech Stock

Uber Stock: The Global Hustle Gets a Valuation

Somewhere between Jakarta gridlock and a Parisian taxi strike, Uber Technologies Inc. is still pretending to be a tech company rather than the world’s most sophisticated labor arbitrage scheme. Yet Wall Street keeps pricing the stock as if every scooter in Bogotá will someday sprout wings and fly to a moon made entirely of soft-serve IPO money. At Monday’s close of $65.42—up 38 % year-to-date—Uber’s market cap hovers around $135 billion, roughly the GDP of Hungary, a country that at least manufactures things you can drop on your foot.

The international angle matters because Uber’s bull case is basically a geography textbook with surge pricing. In Mexico City, where peso volatility makes crypto look sedate, Uber still beats negotiating with a cabbie who claims his meter is “on vacation.” In Lagos, the app’s acceptance of cash payments has turned it into the de-facto banking app for a population the formal sector forgot. And in London, Uber clings on by its fingernails after regulators discovered that “disruption” sometimes translates to “licensing fraud.” Each market is a separate regulatory soap opera, but traders in New York bundle them into a neat narrative called “global TAM expansion”—TAM being finance-speak for “we made up a really big number.”

The macro backdrop is where the joke sharpens. Central banks are simultaneously fighting inflation and climate change, which means your ride from Heathrow now costs more than a transatlantic flight did in 1999. That should, in theory, curb demand. Instead, Uber’s Q1 gross bookings rose 20 % to $37.6 billion, proof that humans will pay any price to avoid eye contact on public transport. Meanwhile, the company’s adjusted EBITDA—Wall Street’s favorite euphemism for “we’ll ignore the bad stuff”—hit $1.4 billion, helped by cutting driver incentives faster than a Zurich banker shredding compliance files. If labor had a union as ruthless as Uber’s finance team, the 20th century would have ended very differently.

Geopolitics provides the dark punchline. When Russia invaded Ukraine, Uber simply switched off its Saint-Petersburg servers faster than you can say “special military operation,” booking a $182 million goodwill impairment that sounded suspiciously like buying moral clarity at a clearance sale. Yet the same company cheerfully operates in Riyadh, where algorithms politely ignore women who still technically need male guardians’ permission to travel. The stock barely twitched on either event; turns out ethical whiplash is already priced in.

Emerging markets, that perennial casino for bored Western capital, offer both growth and existential dread. In India, Uber competes with Ola, whose founder once compared the rivalry to the Cold War, minus the nukes but plus the traffic. SoftBank, ever the international matchmaker with a fire extinguisher, owns chunks of both, proving that portfolio theory is just diversification for people who can’t pick winners. Meanwhile, in Argentina, inflation is so rampant that drivers now calculate fares in U.S. dollars via WhatsApp and pray the central bank doesn’t notice. Uber’s take rate, the slice it skims off each ride, has become a de-facto monetary policy—move over, Christine Lagarde.

The broader significance? Uber’s valuation is a referendum on the global gig economy, that grand experiment in turning every worker into a micro-entrepreneur responsible for their own dental plan. If the stock keeps levitating, it signals investors believe the rest of the planet is ready to embrace precarity with the same enthusiasm Americans reserve for pumpkin-spice futures. If it crashes, well, there’s always DoorDash—because nothing says “economic resilience” like delivering ramen to someone too exhausted to microwave water.

Conclusion: Uber is less a company than a planetary mood ring, changing color with every currency crisis, regulatory tantrum, or viral TikTok about driver pay. Owning the stock is a wager that the world will continue choosing convenience over collective bargaining, one 3 a.m. ride at a time. Until the robots arrive, at which point we’ll all be passengers in someone else’s algorithm. Buckle up; surge pricing applies to the human condition.